Archive for the 'Nicki Minaj' Tag Under 'The Watcher' Category

Despite all of our hopes that this was a bad joke, that "American Idol" really wasn't expanding to four judges again and keeping Randy Jackson to boot, but it's all true.

Fox formally announced Sunday what everyone had been saying since last week: The "AI" judging panel for season 12 will consist of Randy, Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban.

I guess it was inevitable. "The Voice" and "The X Factor" and even "The Next" all have four judges, and there is no way "American Idol" was going to be outdone by those pretenders. The Watcher is a little surprised they didn't go to five judges. Of course, the producers seem to have short memories, having forgotten that "AI" had four judges for several seasons and it was a disaster, prompting them to cut back to three judges for seasons 10 and 11.

But when your ratings are going downhill faster than Bullwinkle in a snowball, there is no such thing as a bad idea.

The next season of the CW series was to be an all-star edition, with models from the first cycle to the 16th – in which Everett had just finished fourth – invited back for a second try at the title.

“I was like, ‘OK, I'm digging it – let's do it!'” Everett says from a car driving her through New York City to catch a flight home to California on Friday. “And literally, five days after I got eliminated I was off to all-stars.

The new season premieres at 9 p.m. Wednesday, with Everett the most recent contestant of the 14 women in the cast. Other contestants include Shannon Stewart Ratliff, the runner-up the debut season way back in 2003, Isis King, the show's first transgender model from 2008, and Laura Kirkpatrick, the bubbly Kentuckian who occasionally wore her grandma Wanda Sue'shome-sewn outfits in 2009.